Build Your Own Jamf Pro Integrations: A Tutorial Series

During Penn State MacAdmins 2017, I delivered my first ever workshop style session entitled “Build Your Own Jamf Pro Integrations.” Going in I felt well prepared and convinced that people would walk away feeling empowered to build new kinds of functionality atop their Jamf Pro environments.

The result was not what I envisioned.

Information about the level of experience with Python that was required coming into the workshop was lost in the posting. My slide pacing was too fast. People weren’t given enough time to write down the examples on screen before I would move on to lab sections which did not contain any code examples. Due to a lot of the group not being at the needed experience level with Python I burned through extra time moving around to help them troubleshoot issues and reach the next step. I ended up not finishing all of the content I had prepared and the workshop was left with an unfinished air about it.

Overall, I wasn’t too happy with how the workshop turned out. Some of the attendees afterwards gave me some feedback about what could have been done to improve for a future version (which I was also encouraged to submit for 2018). Make sure the prerequisite experience for the workshop is clearly communicated. The full code being available prior to the workshop would have made transitioning between sections easier. Volunteer assistants to help others with issues and errors as they arise to allow me to focus on delivery. Do a full day and not a half: I had more than enough content to fill it.

Later, when the form submitted feedback was compiled and provided, I found that on a whole the sentiments above were shared by many. They enjoyed the content, they liked the hands-on approach, but structure and timing prevented them from getting the most out of it. The reception was better than I had expected (coming from an IT background, I know it’s more likely that people will submit complaints than compliments).

While I still intend to submit this workshop again for MacAdmins 2018, I have decided to adapt the slide deck into a multi-part tutorial series that will cover building your first Flask (Python) based integration with Jamf Pro and Slack.

Once this post has gone live, each part of the tutorial will go up once a day until the series has been completed. The full code for the complete sample project will be available on my GitHub on day of the last posting.

Requirements

You can use either Python 2 or Python 3, but you will need to create a virtual environment and install the required modules from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

If you are going to use the Python installation that came with your Mac (Python 2) you can install pip and virtualenv using the following commands:

~$ sudo easy_install pip
~$ sudo pip install virtualenv

If you have installed another copy of Python (either 2 or 3) on your Mac, or you are installing Python on Windows or Linux, these commands should be available as a part of that.

Create the virtual environment for the project somewhere in your user directory (the root or your Documents folder would both work):

~$ virtualenv byojamf

To use your new virtual environment call it’s activate script and you will see the environment’s name appear in parenthesis in the terminal session:

~$ source /path/to/byojamf/bin/activate
(byojamf) ~$

Now install the three PyPI modules that we will be using for this sample project: